In the Heart of the Canyon (22 page)

“Hey, Mitchell!” Abo shouted. “Are you trying to embarrass us or something?”

Mitchell grunted but kept going.

JT turned to Peter and Amy. “We like Mitchell,” he confided, “but Mitchell can be a little intense. And you’re not hearing any of this.”

“Twenty more, Mark!” Abo called.

“You
like Mitchell,” said Dixie. “Mitchell takes himself way too seriously
for me. We need to put Mitchell in his place. A few practical jokes wouldn’t hurt. Maybe I should get out my bugs.”

Here, finally was the chance Peter had been waiting for since stepping off the bus back up at Lee’s Ferry.

“What bugs?” he asked pleasantly immediately regretting it, for it sounded sexual, though he couldn’t say why.

“Show Peter your bugs, Dixie,” said Abo.

And that sounded even more sexual! Wait! Did Abo intend a double meaning? Had Dixie said something to him in private about what a skilled paddler Peter was or how brave he’d been while swimming Hance? He swung his legs around and climbed across the gear. Dixie, meanwhile, had brought out a baggie of plastic bugs—not the neon-colored ones you’d get in a gumball machine but lifelike versions, the kind you might find at a museum gift shop. She picked out a scorpion and tossed it to Abo, who jumped and screamed in a falsetto.

“Bed or day bag?” said Dixie. “Coffee mug maybe?”

Peter felt so privileged to be a part of this plot that he had to restrain himself, for he had a lot of practical jokes up his sleeve, his sister could attest to that, and if the guides wanted to put Mitchell in his place, Peter would be only too glad to help.

But JT was shaking his head. “Forget the jokes, people,” he said, slapping his menu book shut. “I don’t need Mitchell having a heart attack. He’s a pain, but we’re not going to play around with him. That’s all I need, is more shit on this trip.”

“Boo,” said Abo. “Hiss.”

They all fell silent. Peter picked through the bugs and found a centipede and laid it on his thigh and admired it.

“Speaking of which,” Abo said after a moment, “how’s Ruth’s leg?”

“Terrible.”

“Even with the Cipro?”

“Doesn’t work that quick.”

“Think we’ll evacuate?” asked Dixie.

“God, I just don’t know! I sure wish she’d started that Cipro earlier,” JT said.

“Why didn’t she?” asked Abo.

“Saving it for something important, probably,” sighed JT. “Isn’t that always the case?” He got up and balanced his way across to his own boat, where he opened up the cooler and began gathering the ingredients for the night’s dinner.

This had the effect of breaking up the group, for Abo and Dixie were on dinner duty, and Amy trudged off to her campsite. Peter stayed there, alone on Dixie’s boat. She’d left her ammo box open, and there was a creased picture of Dixie and her boyfriend, taped to the inside of the lid. The boyfriend barely had any hair at all. Peter wished he hadn’t seen the picture because he didn’t want to imagine Dixie with a guy who had no hair.

He tucked the centipede in his pocket and smoothed his hand over the rubbery surface of her sleeping pad. He thought of her lying on this pad at night, with her blue sarong loosely covering her hips. He pictured that twisted silver amulet, the ancient horse, warm in the hollow of her throat—which opened the floodgates, and Peter finally allowed himself to wonder what it would be like to make love on a raft in the middle of a smooth stretch of dark water, floating to Baja.

“Not at all, honey,” Jill assured Sam. “Dad just wants to sleep by the rocks, and I’d rather sleep by the water tonight.”

“Well, he
looks
mad,” said Sam.

“Silly goose,” said Jill, rubbing his back.

A
side from Jill and Mark barely speaking to one another, the next two days were glorious. For one thing, by now they’d all pretty much internalized the routines of life on the river, so those baffling challenges of the first few days—packing bags, loading and unloading—were now automatic. Expertise bred confidence, which in turn bred a collective good mood, no small factor on a river trip.

For another thing, after the Big Ones came a relatively gentle and magical stretch of the river, and JT made a point of letting them stop and play in the shady waterfalls and pools that were such a contrast to the harsh landscape of the last several days. The Compsons did indeed get a Christmas picture of all four in front of Shinumo Falls (a terrible photo though, wooden smiles, stick postures); farther down at Elves Chasm, the cool mossy rocks and trickling water soothed everyone’s nerves, still raw from the day before. The only moment of ill will came when Mitchell climbed up on a big boulder and dove into the pool below, reminding JT how quickly everything could change.

“I told you guys the first day, NO DIVING!” he exclaimed. “You want to crack your head open?”

(“Did you get a picture of me?” Mitchell asked Lena.)

But there were other, more unique twists of fate that were helping too. The Cipro seemed to be working, for starters. Evelyn stopped trying to be so useful all the time. And Mitchell’s dreaded camera ran out of memory, at least until the end of the day when he could retrieve the spare memory card from his overnight bag.

In any case, those two days went more smoothly than any since leaving Lee’s Ferry. Or so it seemed to JT. He’d done too many trips to read much into this and knew it portended nothing, really; but he
definitely enjoyed the good luck that extended through Day Nine, especially when Mitchell figured he had more than enough liquor for the rest of the trip and offered gin and tonics to everyone who was of legal age. Also when Jill spoke a few words to Mark, which gave him hope that he wasn’t going to witness another marital bust-up on this trip. The most magical moment came just before bedtime, when Lloyd experienced a mysterious window of lucidity and told them all of early trips on the river, when they wore canvas sneakers and cutoffs, and there was no such thing as sunscreen, and Glen Canyon Dam hadn’t been built, and the water was warm and wild and the tamarisk hadn’t yet taken over the corridor and jets were nonexistent and at night, if it was cool, you could build a campfire and fall asleep to the snap of embers sparking up through the chimney of cliffs into the starry sky above.

Only Susan was having a hard time at this point. Although she appreciated the ease of routine, a certain weariness was creeping in. Dare she call it boredom? Sometimes the rapids all seemed alike; sometimes the canyon walls felt closed in. Was she the only one who was getting tired of all this beauty?

By now her wine tasted like plastic, and it was never cold enough. The coffee was muddy. And to be perfectly frank, she was tired of group camping. Everyone snored, it seemed, and the mats were so thin that every morning she woke up with sore shoulders and a knot in her neck and a pain in her lower back that didn’t disappear even after Dixie showed her how to stretch. There were scorpions to worry about, and red ants, and rattlesnakes.

She was dragging her overnight bag down to the boats that morning when the obvious occurred to her:
There was an end to all this
. Had she forgotten? In five days she’d emerge from the canyon heat and walk into an air-conditioned hotel room, with a pillow-top mattress and cool sheets and her own personal refrigerator. There would be a clean robe hanging in the closet, chilled wine in the little refrigerator. She would step into a hot shower, stand beneath the silt-free spray, and wash thirteen days’ worth of grit down the drain.

“How do the guides do it?” she asked Jill the next afternoon. They were riding in the back of Dixie’s boat, lounging with their feet up. Peter was rowing; Dixie herself was riding up front, advising Peter as needed.

“Do what?” asked Jill.

“Stay so enthusiastic! I can’t imagine making this trip twice, let alone a hundred and twenty-five times.”

“Oh, I could live down here,” Jill said. “No laundry, no grocery stores, no carpools …”

Susan would have agreed with her the first few days. But not at this point. At this point, she wanted a bath. She wanted to see a street lined with fat-leafed maple trees.

“I miss my bed,” she said. “And a mattress—what a concept! Air-conditioning, a quiet room to myself …”

“But hasn’t this trip been good for you and Amy?” Jill asked.

“Amy wants absolutely nothing to do with me down here.”

Jill didn’t reply, which disappointed Susan, for she’d hoped Jill would have some inside knowledge about Amy’s feelings that would contradict her.

“Amy would rather spend her time with Peter,” Susan said.

“But that’s good, isn’t it? She’s seventeen, after all. Don’t discount the power of peer relationships.”

Peer? thought Susan. He’s twenty-seven.

And he’s always giving her beer, if you haven’t noticed
, said the Mother Bitch.
If Amy weren’t so fat, you’d think he was trying to take advantage of her
.

Susan felt her eyes smart. With two fingers, she reached under her lenses and dabbed at her lower lids.

“What’s the matter?” asked Jill.

Susan smiled ruefully. It was hard for her to put her finger on it. She felt like such an awful mother for thinking the thoughts she had sometimes. But there they were. Perhaps this mother of two from Salt Lake City would understand, down here on the river.

“Did you have a mental image of your children, before they were born?” she asked.

“Sure! They were going to look just like me.”

Susan laughed in spite of herself, for the Compson boys didn’t look anything like Jill, being pink-skinned and blond, as opposed to Jill with her olive complexion and dark, wavy hair.

“Well,
I
envisioned a little girl with a Dutch cut and bangs,” Susan declared. “She would be able to sing. We would harmonize on long car rides. She would want a horse too.”

“I don’t know about the singing, but I take it the horse didn’t pan out?”

“Or dance, or team sports, or tennis.” Susan wanted suddenly to tell Jill about Amy’s SAT scores. But she was afraid it would sound braggy.

“Still, she’s awfully nice,” said Jill. “I noticed it the first night with the boys—teaching them card tricks and all. And she’s smart. You can tell. She and Peter were talking about Virginia Woolf I was impressed. Does she know where she wants to go to college?”

“Possibly Duke,” Susan said. “Maybe Yale.”

“You see? You should be proud of her!”

“I
am
. I just …” Susan put her hands over her face. “Nobody tells it like it is,” she cried. “The doctor calls her heavy. Her father calls her large. Everyone tiptoes around the fact that she’s just terribly, terribly overweight. And she never, ever talks to me!”

The water lapped gently against the side of the boat as they began to pick up speed. Jill leaned over and patted water on her arms. “When I was a teenager, I had acne,” she said. “And my parents denied it. They said, Oh, it’s just a pimple here and there. ‘Dab a little makeup on your face; you’re the only one who notices it.’ Which was not true. I looked like I had the chicken pox. And it must be especially hard, with you being so trim and all.”

“Sometimes I think that’s what did it,” sniffed Susan.

“Why?”

“Because I watch my weight. I like eating healthy. I like being thin. So maybe I made too big a deal over it, while Amy was growing up.”

Jill snorted. “Matthew’s sensitive—does that mean I mollycoddled him? And Sam’s a clown—does that mean I didn’t give him enough attention? We mothers certainly blame ourselves too much.”

The boat dipped down into another rapid. Jill and Susan barely noticed. It was too noisy to talk while they were in it.

“So what happened with Mark the other day?” Susan asked, once they were through.

“Oh,” said Jill, and she raised her face to the sun. “Too much togetherness, I guess.”

Susan knew that wasn’t the case.

“Fine,” Jill said. “We bicker about the kids sometimes.”

“He’s Mormon, isn’t he?”

“Right.”

“And you’re not.”

“Right.”

“So how do you deal with that?” And Susan, who usually bent over backward not to pry too much, was able to marvel at her boldness. How long, she asked herself, might it have taken her to ask Jill these things, if they hadn’t been on the river together?

“You mean, am I the lost soul of the tribe? Mostly it’s a problem for his parents,” said Jill. “We get together at holidays, and they want to see my pantry, and I show them my pantry, and they say, ‘That’s not a pantry; we mean a
ree-ul payantree,’
and Mark steps in at that point and reminds them that we’ve had mice and don’t really feel like storing a hundred pounds of rice in our basement.”

“That’s nice, that he sticks up for you.”

“I suppose. Although being the bitch that I am, I always focus on what he
doesn’t
do for me, instead of what he
does
do.”

Both women chuckled, in mutual recognition.

“Remind me again, where’s Amy’s father?” Jill asked.

“Boston,” Susan replied. “Amy goes and visits him in August. He has a cottage on a lake. She babysits his kids.” It suddenly seemed pathetic to her, that that was what her daughter did for the month of August at age seventeen.